“Climate Change” as Religion

October 1, 2019 16 Comments

Somewhat recently I shared brunch with a friend, a non-believer. She has known about my Christian faith for some time. We’ve been friends for over 15 years, and I enjoy talking with her on a variety of subjects, some controversial. We can disagree yet not be disagreeable to each other.

Because she had a nominal Catholic upbringing, she was not wholly unfamiliar with the Holy Scriptures. Consequently, I understood that, though she knew some things in the Christian Bible, she did not accept the authority of those Scriptures. Therefore, I prefaced the following statement with this understanding as a premise: I remarked how, with current technology, we have the means to impose what Scripture calls the ‘mark of the beast’ (Revelation 13:16-17) on a worldwide scale. All that is lacking is a unified political power structure to implement and mandate it.

Rather than agree this was true, she refused to engage on the subject—because she didn’t believe in the Scriptures. Though I could not understand how one must necessarily believe in Scripture in toto in order to engage in a general conversation about one aspect of it, we finally just acknowledged (though we both knew this well-beforehand) that she did not share my faith-belief—this hyphenated term one of my choosing.

Subsequent to this, I remarked how most everyone has an opinion on “climate change”, aka anthropogenic [man-made] global warming (AGW), yet most everyone lacks the requisite knowledge base to form an informed opinion on this matter. I noted that there is some info available online that the motivated layperson could read to become more acquainted with the particulars—material that goes beyond the sound bites one hears on corporate media. Without providing any sort of reasoning or affirming whether or not she read any such material, she proclaimed her belief in “climate change.” I told her I agreed that the climate is always changing, but that that is not the same thing as “climate change” (AGW). I asked her to provide some reasoning, some substance behind her stance (and I was quite ready to do same). She said something to the effect, if not verbatim: “I just believe it’s true.”

I slyly smiled and replied, “So that’s your faith-belief?”

She cocked her head a bit, and with a quasi-grin and raised eyebrows gave me one of those looks…

Advertisement

Filed under Eschatology, New Age, New World Order, "Climate Change"/Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Tagged with , , ,

16 Responses to “Climate Change” as Religion

  1. Craig says:
    October 3, 2019 at 9:59 pm

    Tony Heller has been making videos on the ‘skeptic’ side for quite a while. Here’s his most recent one:

    Like

    Reply
    • Craig says:
      October 5, 2019 at 12:37 pm

      Following is part of an email I’d sent a while back:

      “The models are convenient fictions
      that provide something very useful.”
      – Dr David Frame,
      climate modeler, Oxford University

      The IPCC is the supposed authority on “climate change”. Now, for the ‘other’ side. Surely, you’d heard about the leaked ‘Climategate’ emails, right? If not, or even if so, here’s a link to many different articles on this scandal: https://wattsupwiththat.com/climategate/

      Here is former tenured professor (now retired) Judith Curry, providing testimony to the Senate.

      Climatologist Breaks the Silence on Global Warming Groupthink

      Dr. Judith Curry is Professor and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Following is her verbal remarks as delivered to last week’s US Senate Commerce Committee Hearing on “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate Over the Magnitude of the Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.”

      …Human caused climate change is a theory in which the basic mechanism is well understood, but whose magnitude is highly uncertain. No one questions that surface temperatures have increased overall since 1880, or that humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, or that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet. However there is considerable uncertainty and disagreement about the most consequential issues: whether the warming has been dominated by human causes versus natural variability, how much the planet will warm in the 21st century, and whether warming is ‘dangerous’.

      The central issue in the scientific debate on climate change is the extent to which the recent (and future) warming is caused by humans versus natural climate variability. Research effort and funding has focused on understanding human causes of climate change. However we have been misled in our quest to understand climate change, by not paying sufficient attention to natural causes of climate change, in particular from the sun and from the long-term oscillations in ocean circulations.

      Why do scientists disagree about climate change? The historical data is sparse and inadequate. There is disagreement about the value of different classes of evidence, notably the value of global climate models. There is disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence. And scientists disagree over assessments of areas of ambiguity and ignorance.

      How then, and why, have climate scientists come to a consensus about a very complex scientific problem that the scientists themselves acknowledge has substantial and fundamental uncertainties?

      Climate scientists have become entangled in an acrimonious political debate that has polarized the scientific community. As a result of my analyses that challenge IPCC conclusions, I have been called a denier by other climate scientists, and most recently by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. My motives have been questioned by Representative Grijalva, in a recent letter sent to the President of Georgia Tech.

      There is enormous pressure for climate scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure comes not only from politicians, but from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves who are green activists. Reinforcing this consensus are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests.

      Given that there really isn’t a consensus among climatologists, why are we constantly told that there IS a consensus? And why is it that it is only those with the ‘correct’ ideology—for that is truly what it is—receive funding, and that those who challenge this “consensus” lose their funding and are called “climate deniers”? As far as I know, there is not ONE politician with the requisite background to be conversant in climatology; so, why are they speaking as if they know the truth?

      https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060047798

      Now-retired Curry has her own blog, focusing on the skeptic community: https://judithcurry.com/page/1/

      Climate Depot Special Report:

      More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
      Scientists Continue to Debunk Fading “Consensus” in 2008 & 2009 & 2010
      300+ page report Presented to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico,

      December 9, 2010:

      Click to access 2010_Senate_Minority_Report.pdf

      We should all want to be wise and careful stewards of the beautiful planet we call home. But most of us realise that humans in general are not being good stewards. We are wasteful with our natural resources and have reduced biodiversity. Therefore, when we read about groups and organisations calling for a ‘green revolution’ and a new relationship between humanity and nature it is easy to agree with their ideas.

      However, certain aspects of the modern green movement that is permeating every segment of our society are not about protecting the environment. You don’t have to dig very deep to discover the true beliefs of the influential leaders who are using genuine concerns about the environment to promote an agenda of fear and control.

      The two previous paragraphs are the opening words to the Green Agenda home page site, which has compiled quite a wide array of quotes from those promoting “climate change” (or by its old name “global warming”):

      http://green-agenda.com/

      “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
      climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
      bring about justice and equality in the world.”
      – Christine Stewart,
      former Canadian Minister of the Environment

      “I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts
      on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
      – Al Gore,
      Climate Change activist

      And here’s Gore calling this a “spiritual issue”, one that can raise “Global Consciousness to a higher level”—very typical New Age/New Spirituality speak.

      “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and
      spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest
      opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level.”
      – Al Gore,
      Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

      Like

      Reply
      • Craig says:
        October 5, 2019 at 3:35 pm

        ‘97% Of Climate Scientists Agree’ Is 100% Wrong

        • Alex Epstein Contributor
          Opinion

        If you’ve ever expressed the least bit of skepticism about environmentalist calls for making the vast majority of fossil fuel use illegal, you’ve probably heard the smug response: “97% of climate scientists agree with climate change” — which always carries the implication: Who are you to challenge them?

        The answer is: you are a thinking, independent individual–and you don’t go by polls, let alone second-hand accounts of polls; you go by facts, logic and explanation.

        Here are two questions to ask anyone who pulls the 97% trick.

        1. What exactly do the climate scientists agree on?

        Usually, the person will have a very vague answer like “climate change is real.”

        Which raises the question: What is that supposed to mean? That climate changes? That we have some impact? That we have a large impact? That we have a catastrophically large impact? That we have such a catastrophic impact that we shouldn’t use fossil fuels?

        What you’ll find is that people don’t want to define what 97% agree on–because there is nothing remotely in the literature saying 97% agree we should ban most fossil fuel use.

        It’s likely that 97% of people making the 97% claim have absolutely no idea where that number comes from.

        If you look at the literature, the specific meaning of the 97% claim is: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is a global warming trend and that human beings are the main cause–that is, that we are over 50% responsible. The warming is a whopping 0.8 degrees over the past 150 years, a warming that has tapered off to essentially nothing in the last decade and a half…

        2. How do we know the 97% agree?

        To elaborate, how was that proven?

        Almost no one who refers to the 97% has any idea, but the basic way it works is that a researcher reviews a lot of scholarly papers and classifies them by how many agree with a certain position.

        Unfortunately, in the case of 97% of climate scientists agreeing that human beings are the main cause of warming, the researchers have engaged in egregious misconduct.

        One of the main papers behind the 97 percent claim is authored by John Cook, who runs the popular website SkepticalScience.com, a virtual encyclopedia of arguments trying to defend predictions of catastrophic climate change from all challenges.

        Here is Cook’s summary of his paper: “Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”

        This is a fairly clear statement—97 percent of the papers surveyed endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gases were the main cause—main in common usage meaning more than 50 percent.

        But even a quick scan of the paper reveals that this is not the case. Cook is able to demonstrate only that a relative handful endorse “the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” Cook calls this “explicit endorsement with quantification” (quantification meaning 50 percent or more). The problem is, only a small percentage of the papers fall into this category; Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.

        Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.

        The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested:

        “Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.”

        Like

        Reply
        • Craig says:
          October 5, 2019 at 3:40 pm

          Fact Checking The Claim Of 97% Consensus On Anthropogenic Climate Change

          • Earl J. Ritchie, Lecturer, Department of Construction Management

          The claim that there is a 97% consensus among scientists that humans are the cause of global warming is widely made in climate change literature and by political figures. It has been heavily publicized, often in the form of pie charts…

          The 97% figure has been disputed and vigorously defended, with emotional arguments and counterarguments published in a number of papers. Although the degree of consensus is only one of several arguments for anthropogenic climate change – the statements of professional societies and evidence presented in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are others – there is data to suggest that support is lower. In this post, I attempt to determine whether the 97% consensus is fact or fiction.

          The 97% number was popularized by two articles, the first by Naomi Oreskes, now Professor of Science History and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and the second by a group of authors led by John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland. Both papers were based on analyses of earlier publications. Other analyses and surveys arrive at different, often lower, numbers depending in part on how support for the concept was defined and on the population surveyed.

          This public discussion was started by Oreskes’ brief 2004 article, which included an analysis of 928 papers containing the keywords “global climate change.” The article says “none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position” of anthropogenic global warming. Although this article makes no claim to a specific number, it is routinely described as indicating 100% agreement and used as support for the 97% figure.

          In a 2007 book chapter, Oreskes infers that the lack of expressed dissent “demonstrates that any remaining professional dissent is now exceedingly minor.” The chapter revealed that there were about 235 papers in the 2004 article, or 25%, that endorsed the position. An additional 50% were interpreted to have implicitly endorsed, primarily on the basis that they discussed evaluation of impacts. Authors addressing impacts might believe that the Earth is warming without believing it is anthropogenic. In the article, Oreskes said some authors she counted “might believe that current climate change is natural.” It is impossible to tell from this analysis how many actually believed it. On that basis, I find that this study does not support the 97% number.

          The most influential and most debated article was the 2013 paper by Cook, et al., which popularized the 97% figure. The authors used methodology similar to Oreskes but based their analysis on abstracts rather than full content. I do not intend to reopen the debate over this paper. Instead, let’s consider it along with some of the numerous other surveys available.

          Reviews of published surveys were published in 2016 by Cook and his collaborators and by Richard S. J. Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. The 2016 Cook paper, which reviews 14 published analyses and includes among its authors Oreskes and several authors of the papers shown in the chart below, concludes that the scientific consensus “is robust, with a range of 90%–100% depending on the exact question, timing and sampling methodology.” The chart shows the post-2000 opinions summarized in Table 1 of the paper. Dates given are those of the survey, not the publication date. I’ve added a 2016 survey of meteorologists from George Mason University and omitted the Oreskes article.

          The classification of publishing and non-publishing is that used by Cook and his collaborators. These categories are intended to be measures of how active the scientists in the sample analyzed have been in writing peer-reviewed articles on climate change. Because of different methodology, that information is not available in all of the surveys. The categorization should be considered an approximation. The chart shows that over half the surveys in the publishing category and all the surveys in the non-publishing category are below 97%.

          [see link for chart and the remainder of this article.]

          Like

        • Craig says:
          October 5, 2019 at 4:14 pm

          It’s all in where ya start:

          Like

        • Craig says:
          October 7, 2019 at 12:57 pm

          Snopes does a ‘hit piece’ against climate skeptic Tony Heller, though they don’t mention him by name, and they use an archived version of an article on his blog. This blatantly illustrates how Snopes is left-leaning–or at least willing to protect the false narrative relative to “climate change”/anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

          Smoking Gun Of Temperature Fraud

          This video is a response to Snopes hit piece from this week, and uses a new approach to show unequivocally that NOAA adjustments to US temperature are fraudulent.

          Data here: https://realclimatescience.com/2019/10/smoking-gun-of-fraud-in-ushcn-adjustments/

          Like

        • Craig says:
          October 8, 2019 at 8:10 am

          The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
          Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
          Engines stop running, but I have no fear
          ‘Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river
          – chorus from The Clash’s “London Calling” (1979)

          I’m old enough to remember the hysteria promoted in the 1970s about a new “ice age”. Below is a documentary released in 1978 about this:

          Ice Age is Coming 1978 Science Facts

          Featuring Leonard Nimoy, Columbia University, and leading world climate scientists and sponsored by the US Army and the National Science Foundation, this special on climate was televised in 1978.

          The promotion of climate alarmism has been practiced for quite awhile now, but the narrative has changed to one of an impending catastrophic warming–all at the hands of us Westerners. This narrative is accomplished by blatantly, dishonestly changing raw data to conform to it. We must ask ourselves why. Is it all about money, power, and control? For US citizens pondering that question, we must ask how it is that many politicians are able to amass millions during and after holding their political offices. And we must ask, as but one example, why the Obamas would purchase a house at sea level (for $15 million) with this supposed threat of catastrophic sea level rise. Perhaps it’s because they are strong optimists, confident that we’ll get a handle on this “climate change” thing. It certainly couldn’t be because they don’t really believe the narrative they’ve been spouting, could it?

          Like

        • Craig says:
          October 12, 2019 at 12:09 pm

          Founder of The Weather Channel debunks anthropogenic (man-made) global warming:

          Feb 5, 2010
          John Coleman is the founder of the Weather Channel, the original weatherman on Good Morning America and now the lead meteorologist here at KUSI-TV.

          Like

        • Craig says:
          October 13, 2019 at 5:11 pm

          Tony Heller showing more data manipulation:

          In this video I do a simple experiment which demonstrates that NASA’s global temperature graph does not accurately represent Earth’s temperature history. It is the first of a series.

          Like

        • Craig says:
          October 17, 2019 at 12:49 pm

          Tony Heller nailing it home:

          In this video I show how the current symptoms of global warming are identical to the ones which were blamed on global cooling 40 years ago.

          Like

  2. Jim says:
    December 23, 2019 at 1:55 am

    It’s got to the frankly hysterical stage now whereby any major weather event (distinguishable from climate), or the second order effects of weather events (Australia’s bush fires, for example), are automatically taken as evidence for AGW. Any questioning of that implication is often regarded in the MSM and twitterati as being so anti-social, or anti-planet, that it’s ok if you become a target for hate, abuse and possibly violence.

    Like

    Reply
    • Craig says:
      December 23, 2019 at 8:59 am

      I’m afraid you are correct–at least as regards some in certain areas. This is the effects of the propagandizing, the indoctrination, and the scaremongering occurring in our public schools.

      I hope you are enjoying this season. Look for my forthcoming blog post on this subject on Christmas Day. Also, I’ve been working on another that I hope to have completed soon, which I’d like your thoughts on. The latter does not center on any controversial issue–no central doctrine. But I think my proposition improves the understanding of a well-known parable.

      Like

      Reply
  3. Jim says:
    December 25, 2019 at 2:22 am

    I’ll look out for them Craig. Thanks for the heads up. Have a peaceful Christmas and every blessing in Christ be yours and your family’s in abundance throughout 2020.

    Like

    Reply
  4. Jim says:
    December 30, 2019 at 2:00 am

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/29/pension-fund-investments-held-millions-could-rendered-worthless/

    You need to get past the pay wall but the headline is enough. The only thing out of control in all this is how the next decade will be the climate legislation decade and become the ‘one ring to rule them all’!!

    Like

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: